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What Is College For? (Part 2)

By Gary Gutting January 11, 2012 5:30 pmJanuary 11, 2012 5:30 pm

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

In a recent column, I argued that colleges and universities are primarily vehicles for the preservation, development and transmission of our intellectual culture (scientific, humanistic and artistic). Otherwise, I claimed, there is no sense to building these institutions around faculties devoted to this intellectual culture.

There were numerous excellent comments in response. I was especially struck by those who pointed out that, even if I am right about the basic purpose of higher education, there are serious practical difficulties in maintaining this purpose, given other tasks we currently assign to higher education. Most prominently, we expect colleges and universities to give students what they need to find well-paying jobs. Corresponding to this expectation is the worry that the huge cost of higher education (and the resulting levels of debt burdening graduates) greatly reduces its economic value.

Preparing students for the workplace should be the job of high school, not college.

How, exactly, does college prepare students for the workplace? For most jobs, it provides basic intellectual skills: the ability to understand relatively complex instructions, to write and speak clearly and cogently, to evaluate options critically. Beyond these intellectual skills, earning a college degree shows that you have the “moral qualities” needed for most jobs: you have (to put it a bit cynically), for a period of four years and with relatively little supervision, deferred to authority, met deadlines and carried out difficult tasks even when you found them pointless and boring.

This sort of intellectual and moral training, however, does not require studying with experts doing cutting-edge work on, say, Homeric poetry, elementary particle theory or the philosophy of Kant. It does not, that is, require the immersion in the world of intellectual culture that a college faculty is designed to provide. It is, rather, the sort of training that ought to result from good elementary and high school education.

Concretely, students graduating from high school should, to cite one plausible model, be able to read with understanding classic literature (from, say, Austen and Browning to Whitman and Hemingway) and write well-organized and grammatically sound essays; they should know the basic outlines of American and European history, have a good beginner’s grasp of at least two natural sciences as well as pre-calculus mathematics, along with a grounding in a foreign language.

Students with this sort of education would be excellent candidates for many satisfying and well-paying jobs in, for example, sales and service industries, except for those that require highly specialized skills. From the standpoint of employment, high school graduates would have no need of college unless they wanted to be accountants or engineers, pursue pre-professional programs leading to law or medical school or train for doctoral work in science or the humanities. Apart from this, the only good reason they would have for going to college would be for its intellectual culture.

Is it really possible to improve grade school and high school teaching to the level I’m suggesting? Yes, provided we employ the same sort of selection criteria for pre-college teachers as we do for other professionals such as doctors, lawyers and college professors. In contrast to other professions, teaching is not now the domain of the most successful students — quite the contrary. I’ve known many very bright students who had an initial interest in such teaching but soon realized that there is no comparison in terms of salary, prestige and working conditions.

There was a time when outstanding women chose teaching because other professions effectively excluded them. Now that these professions are much more open to women, we have come to accept that pre-college teachers will, on the whole (and with admirable exceptions), be our less successful students. We try to work around this fact by emphasizing training, credentials and accountability. But in the end, as in other professions, there’s no substitute for the highest quality talent. This is not to say that other factors such as class size and school infrastructure are not also relevant. But recruiting the best students as teachers is almost always a necessary condition for successful education.

I entirely appreciate the difficulties involved in transforming our grade schools and high schools so that teaching in them will attract our best and brightest. But without such a transformation, our educational system will remain in a permanent state of crisis. I would add, however, that — as is the case for college professors — the rewards of teaching in good conditions are enough to attract outstanding people even without income at the current levels of doctors and lawyers.

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Given this transformation in pre-college education, we could expect it to provide basic job-training for most students. At that point, we would still face a fundamental choice regarding higher education. We could see it as a highly restricted enterprise, educating only professionals who require advanced specialized skills. Correspondingly, only such professionals would have access to higher education as a locus of intellectual culture.

On the other hand, we could — as I would urge — see college as the entrée to intellectual culture for everyone who is capable of and interested in working at that level of intellectual engagement. But an adequate high school education should be of sufficient quality to make graduates competitive for a wide range of meaningful jobs.

Raising high school to the level I am proposing and opening college to everyone who will profit from it would be an expensive enterprise. We would need significant government support to ensure that all students receive an education commensurate with their abilities and aspirations, regardless of family resources. But the intellectual culture of our citizens should be a primary part of our national well-being, not just the predilection of an eccentric elite. As such, it should be among our highest priorities.

I realize that what I’m offering here is the sketch of an ideal. What we can practically expect to do — and how we might do it— is another question. But often having an ideal vision is the best overall guide to even piecemeal improvements.

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The Stone features the writing of contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. The series moderator is Simon Critchley. He teaches philosophy at The New School for Social Research in New York. To contact the editors of The Stone, send an e-mail to opinionator@nytimes.com. Please include “The Stone” in the subject field.